I've been hearing about them from some New Yorkers on a mailing list for years, didn't really understand what they were about until they started getting more press recently. apparently they've covered some Geraldine Fibbers songs, which is pretty cool.

the first album's really good, as well. the live thing is amazing, though--basically a recording of their final NYC show (the last ever, apparently, though I certainly hope not). saw 'em twice in Seattle, once at Bumbershoot and once before. totally killer both times.

I first saw K&H in London, upstairs at 333 Old Street, in about '97. They hadn't formulated much of an act then. I remember being part-fascinated, part-horrified by the way this drunken harridan butchered some of my favourite songs: loud, off-key, drunken singing accompanied by cocktail piano.

It wasn't till I saw a full show at Fez in New York in '99 that I 'got' them. Kiki launched into a traumatic story - apparently true - about an American couple who didn't feel their child was quite 'right', so their evangelical pastor suggested the child should literally be reborn. The wrapped the child inside a roll of carpet - 'Mummy, I can't breathe" - and pushed it through the long, airless tube, in the belief it would emerge a better person. The child died. Suffocated. "Ah well," said the pastor, "God obviously didn't want your child to live that way."

Kiki followed that up with This Woman's Work, or something, and I was wracked with sobs.

I've since seen them maybe five or six times, though I've never quite captured that same feeling. The best thing about them, for me, is Kiki's stories. Each new show brings a new instalment to her life story. We hear a little bit more about her kids, and get tantalising clues about just how her daughter Missy died.

But their recent shows seem to concentrate more on the songs - and the same bloody songs over and over. Fox in the snow, foxinthesnowfoxinthesnow....

I bought their first album, but - well - without the visuals, without the back-story, you're left with a drunken harridan butchering songs, accompanied by cocktail piano.

I should have read the Alex Ross piece before posting the above. It really is very, very good, and tells you everything you should know about K&H. (Like the fact that their drowned daughter was called Coco, not Missy, gah.)

It wasn't till I saw a full show at Fez in New York in '99 that I 'got' them. Kiki launched into a traumatic story - apparently true - about an American couple who didn't feel their child was quite 'right', so their evangelical pastor suggested the child should literally be reborn. The wrapped the child inside a roll of carpet - 'Mummy, I can't breathe" - and pushed it through the long, airless tube, in the belief it would emerge a better person. The child died. Suffocated. "Ah well," said the pastor, "God obviously didn't want your child to live that way."

dude, that was totally the plot of an episode of CSI. except it was a psychiatrist, not a pastor, and she was suspected of having an affair with/molesting the kid before they figured out the circumstances of the death. or maybe that's just a common story/urban legend.

so...is it worth it just to hear a cd if you've never(will never?) see the show? For months I've been trying to score their Carnegie Hall concert for less than the $20 cdbaby asks for it, a bit steep for a 'had to be there' type situation.

Their version of "Running Up That Hill" is classic-er than classic, largely because Kiki sings it pretty much straight, but in character.

There was a show a while ago at which Coco appeared in a flashback, played by Kathleen Hanna. And I was present at a show where Monica Lewinsky was in the audience. Once Kiki spotted her, well, things got awfully entertaining.

Ditto. I was at the Carnegie Hall show, and since the album is only missing the sight of Kiki's flailing flapper jig -- and her lying passed out on the stage during Herb's British Sea Power cover -- it should be a fine reproduction of the experience.

like the time some fangirl touched her ass. kiki got mad, went backstage, and refused to come back out until the fangirl left the building. so we had to kick her out. after she paid her tab. she didn't leave a tip though.

like the time some fangirl touched her ass. kiki got mad, went backstage, and refused to come back out until the fangirl left the building. so we had to kick her out. after she paid her tab. she didn't leave a tip though. -- phil-two (philtw...), March 11th, 2005.she sounds so far up herself she's inside out...

They fake it so real they are beyond fake, a performance of utter heartbreak and, if not redemption through, at least the simple comfort of, enduring love so utterly convincing that whether or not it's ironic is completely beside the point. That only makes it more genuinely moving.

Love the live set, but can't imagine what it would be like to only hear it without having the experience of their show to map it to.

Note: If you've been on the ILX po-pomo thread, they may offer a sufficient answer.

I saw the last half of that Bumbershoot set, and thought it was outstanding! The reason why I saw the last half was because the line to see them was gargantuan.. so I missed the first half, since they could only let people in while letting an equal number of people out.

I still treasure the story about how Kiki tried to be Noel Gallagher's groupie.. fucking best story told at a concert ever.

I've never seen them but I love the album. It's, for one thing, the smartest comedy act I've heard in forever. The song selection is great. I love the way Herb will occasionally come bellowing in with tuneless Viking-warrior backing vocals. The "Revolution Medley" might be my favorite song of the year. Every time Kiki starts with the "Wu Tang motherfucker," I can't quite believe it. Fabulous punk cabaret.

I think one of the things that makes them work so well is the combination of 1) their utter music-geekery (I mean, come on, making a 10-minute showpiece out of a Butt Trumpet cover?!) and 2) their willingness to occasionally sing something totally unscreechily and milk it for all the cabaret sentiment it's worth.

I played the live album's "Institutionalized" for a friend of mine who'd never heard them before, and didn't tip her off... and of course the setup is such that it just sounds like Kiki babbling about her familial relations at first, and then something about the general outline of what she's saying seems vaguely familiar, and before you know it, wham: "PUT ME IN AN INSTITUTION!" "INSTITUTIONALIZED!" My friend didn't stop laughing for about three minutes.

jaymc i'd highly recommend giving the album as many chances as it takes (my #1 album on my p&j ballot, i'm pretty sure it's the album i've played most this year too), there's alot of humor but alot more than humor to it - i swear it's the most cathartic album i've heard since god knows when: "you'll laff! you'll cry!" i bite kiki's style HARD when i sing "total eclipse of the heart" at karaoke (and BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, ilxors doctor casino and emily s. can verify this) and would bite her style when i sing "institutionalized" except that's already a pretty fucking hard karaoke song as is just to pull off straight (ie. imagine and REGARD the FULL SCOPE of kiki's triumph). would kill to see them, DEEPLY envy that getting to see them perform was as routine for nyers as jeff mangum or whoever was down here - would DEFINITELY make that trade, as a huge fan of karaoke, covers, drag shows, joan crawford live at town hall and the album obv. i can't imagine i could possibly have been disappointed.

...however, after this rave in the Times, they may not have trouble filling it up.

Kiki & Herb’: The Road to Catharsis With Those 2 Immortals By BEN BRANTLEY

That’s one gorgeous set of teardrops that the immortal Kiki DuRane is wearing for her mind-popping Broadway debut. Kiki, a molting songbird for all seasons, and Herb, her happily suffering shadow and accompanist, opened last night at the Helen Hayes Theater in “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” a hyper-magnified cabaret concert that has the heat and dazzle of great balls of fire.

Actually, since this transcendental lounge act is fond of biblical imagery, make that great swords of fire — or, if you prefer, a burning bush.

But about those teardrops. Whenever Kiki tilts her face upward, toward her key light — and like any self-adoring goddess, she does that a lot — her eyes brim with the most brilliant pools of brine you have ever seen. Well, not to spoil the illusion, but those ain’t tears: they’re rhinestones (or something like), strategically glued just beneath her lower lashes.

It is a tribute to the perverse showbiz genius of Kiki and Herb that once you twig on to this shameless trompe l’oeil, you don’t feel merely amused. Nor do you think that the singer has been trading only in paper-moon emotions, or making fun of those who do, as she croons her whiskey-pickled way through bathetic ballads and angry anthems.

Those artificial tears are a comic grace note, sure, but they are also a totem for feelings of devastating depth and substance. And a performance that should, by rights, be just a night of imitative song and shtick from another pair of happy high-campers from the alternative club scene becomes irresistibly full-bodied art.

Fakery is often more real than reality in the glamorous and tawdry world of theater. I should probably state, for the uninitiated, that the ultrawomanly Kiki is channeled by a man named Justin Bond. Herb is the alter ego of a truly inspired pop musicologist named Kenny Mellman.

And while Kiki and Herb claim to be as old as the hills, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman are only in their 40’s and 30’s, respectively. The roadmaps of geriatric lines on their faces have been drawn with the blunt bogusness of children portraying grandparents in a school play. And by the way, Kiki and Herb now say the reason they didn’t die, as they had promised, after their farewell concert at Carnegie Hall in 2004 is that they can’t. The reasons are complicated, but let’s just say they involve their having been present at the birth of Jesus.

Believe it or not, that makes sense. In their decade as one of downtown’s savviest acts, Kiki and Herb have always traded on the reassuring illusion of immortality conferred by deeply stylish cabaret performers of advanced age.

You know, the kind you stumble upon after midnight, improbably drawing oxygen from smoky tunes and smoky rooms in bars found everywhere from the inns Ramada to the hotels Carlyle and Algonquin. When Kiki sings — and her numbers go from Eisenhower-era velvet (“Make Yourself Comfortable”) to punk-era tarpaper (the Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed”) — she suggests some wondrous hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Elaine Stritch, Patti Smith and Kitty Carlisle Hart. As with those very different women, the point is never the prettiness of the voice but the history behind it and the passion to endure that vibrates within.

There is also the vibrato (real or metaphoric) of suffering, that public overdose of private pain that made Judy Garland a figure of such religious adoration. The references to Jesus in Kiki’s spiels aren’t inappropriate, since Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman appreciate the role of the self-lacerating performer who cathartically embodies the anguish of his audience. (“Kiki and Herb Will Die for You” is the title of their last CD, a recording of their Carnegie Hall concert.)

Between songs, Kiki describes her early history with an uncaring mother and abusive father (“I always said if you weren’t molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid”); her childhood in a Pennsylvania orphanage, where she met Herb, a gay Jewish foundling; the seesaw career of high and low living, institutionalizations and shifting musical fashions; and the death of her little daughter, Coco, which Kiki describes while staring into the murky depths of her glass of Canadian Club.

Famous names are tossed into the swirling mix. Kiki danced in burlesque nightclubs with Maya Angelou; she and Herb were supposed to have performed the theme song for Mel Gibson’s Holocaust series on television until his arrest for drunk driving put an end to the project; world leaders (you can imagine which ones) are gutted, roasted and fried.

This sounds like regulation tacky countercultural standup, laced with the overemotional kitsch that drag queens borrow from old movies, right? That sensibility is certainly evoked by Scott Pask’s set — a bizarre sylvan landscape that suggests Salvador Dalí working in Las Vegas and includes a blasted tree that Kiki perches on to sing (and drink) — and Marc Happel’s Loretta Young-meets-Cher costumes.

But like most of the best artists of their generation, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman have tunneled under the ironic distance that seems to have been their birthright to reclaim the passion beneath the pose. The musical stylings of Herb (whose liquidly bobbing head and blissed-out expression suggest that his nervous system is located in the strings of his piano) and the vocals of Kiki are radioactive with an angry sorrow, ecstasy and cosmic fatigue so profound that it turns into cosmic punch-drunkenness. They use the surface of camp as a tool for detonating surfaces. (Bette Midler surprised and seduced audiences with just such a style as a singer at gay clubs 30-some years ago.)

It’s a musical approach that finds a common denominator in songs made famous by artists like Public Enemy (quaintly presented as an example of folk music) and the Scissors Sisters and sentimental narratives like “One Tin Soldier” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” And who else would segue from the masochistic power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into a musical setting of William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming”?

If the idea of the end of the world keeps creeping into the show, that’s appropriate to these times, isn’t it? But Kiki and Herb have been around long enough to know that the threat of doomsday is old news and that life — dammit all — goes on.

At one point Kiki looks into the audience and wonders who on earth is out there. This is Broadway, after all, the place where tourists come from around the country with their families to be entertained. “Do any of you have a family?” she asks of the crowd and concludes that this must be an audience of foundlings.

Maybe. But remember that the subtitle of the show, which runs only through Sept. 10, is “Alive on Broadway,” not merely “Live.” Though they may disappear when the lights go down, and the makeup comes off, Kiki and Herb onstage are Alive with a capital A, with all the human vitality and fallibility that that implies. This is more than can be said for the synthetically enhanced automatons appearing in most Broadway musicals.

man, Kiki got drunk off her ass last night (my friend hadda grab her when she almost fell off a table). She read a lot of lyrics off a stand, following the example of a recent show by 94-year-old former Marx Brothers ingenue Kitty Carlisle. Best line of the night was "I may not know the words, ladies and gentlemen, but I understand the song." (Best anecdote to nowhere was about her sister's delight that Farrah Fawcett shares her malady of ass cancer.)

I'd like to renege on previous comments of "not getting it"; three shows in thirty days cured me of that. Truly, I've never seen a more punk-as-fuck show. Last watch was ringside about three feet away and my table mates and I got just BLASTED; watching K+H at that proximity is some serious dick-in-a-blender action.

I've got both their records, and while it's a good way to introduce people to them (see anecdote above), it's not the same as the "oh shit, what's she going to do next?" experience of seeing them live.

But I bet someday people are going to trade recordings of K&H live the way they do with Bill Hicks or Andy Kaufman recordings now.

I saw them at the Opera House in Sydney for so cheap (esp. considering the insane price of tickets for them in SF the last time around), but strangely the show was almost EXACTLY the same as the one I saw New Year's Eve two years ago.